Credit Card Payment Systems

[Steve Walker]

Has anyone any experience of choosing an online credit card payment system provider? We provide a highly specialist documents and data service. Most of our users have unlimited access to our content through corporate sponsorship, a few through billed pay-as-you-go contracts. Some companies have been unwilling to enter into an ongoing relationship but would be interested in occasionally paying for ad hoc access, and we are considering providing a similar service for individual users who don't have a corporate agreement. These are likely to be distress purchases, with people needing documents urgently and wanting to pay on credit card and download immediately. So we're talking about a fairly low volume of fairly high value transactions.

 

So, my priorities are that it has to be real-time, it needs a good API for integration into our systems (I don't want to install and customise templates, I want a clean, well documented API I can understand and use from C#), the provider's payment system has to look professional (I've seen some so-called pro solutions that I've been reluctant to use because they look suspiciously amateurish) and the costs have to be reasonable for something which is likely to be something of a peripheral income stream.

 

Anyone any suggestions? I've just downloaded PayPal's SDK and registered on their developer centre, but they seem to have ongoing problems with their developer centre which date from at least November. That does not bode well to me.

[nick]

worldpay http://www.worldpay.co.uk is pretty good, but speak to your own bank, most of them have decent systems these days, even if they don't publicise them too well.

[Elton]

A lot of banks use Protx - http://www.protx.com/

 

I used to use it. Fine when it worked, but a nuisance when they had downtime, which seemed all too often to me.

[Steve Walker]

Excellent, thanks chaps, I will investigate.

[wanzelbin]

I've used PayPal and NetBanx, and both have been fine.

 

With Netbanx I had to create an html template page and send it to them, while with PayPal I stuck with the really simple "Buy Now" button stuff (bit too simple for your situation though). Netbanx were really good and helpful, but PayPal was a bit of a pain. Difficult to find info on their site, and I was pleased I wasn't trying to do anything more complicated!

 

Never seen an API used though. Having never wanted to handle the legal and security issues associated with storing and/or handling card details, I've always let the Netbanx / PayPal lot deal with all of that. Simply POST any required info (e.g. name, postcode or anything else you may have got from your user) to a secure URL, and they'll redirect the user to an appropriate page on your own server (or wherever you want) once they've taken the details and processed the transaction.

 

Heard good things about worldpay too, but never used them.

[Chris Goddard]

I approached Worldpay a while ago and was up to actually signing up when my life how shall I say CHANGED all of a sudden like!! But nothing but praise for them as far as it went.